I recently took a vacation. I had not had a vacation in several years. This vacation was incredible. I flew to Alaska and took a chartered fishing trip. I had never fished in the ocean before so this was a first, but most certainly will not be the last. We stayed at the Trophy King Lodge. I highly recommend this place. Our typical day was like this: We were woken up at 7:00 a.m. by a knock on the door. Went to the lodge for a nice breakfast, coffee and some good conversation before heading out to fish. The lodge supplied us with all the gear we needed, from rain gear to fishing poles, bait boat and a fishing guide. We set out in a 23 foot aluminum boat, sounds kind of small to be on the ocean, but was plenty big. The fishing guides know the waters well and would take us to a spot known to catch Halibut. We fished until noon or so and headed back to the lodge for lunch. Many Halibut were caught in the morning and we had a nice catch thus far. After arriving back at the lodge, we took pictures of our catch and headed in for lunch. Our guides stayed behind and cleaned our catch, vacuum packed the fish and froze them before coming in for lunch. Lunch was always fantastic as was breakfast. All meals are also included in the package. After lunch we headed out to fish for King Salmon. Not as exciting as Halibut, but fun non the less. One of the guys on my boat caught the only King Salmon of the day. A 70lb monster of a salmon. No exaggerating either, it did weigh 70lbs. Then back to the lodge for dinner. The nice thing about boating in and out from the fishing, is the scenery. Beautiful mountains and trees. Even a volcano.

Straight across the Cook Inlet is a nice mountain range and Mt. Readout, an active volcano. If the clouds were at a minimum and not too much wind you could see smoke and ash billowing from the top. It was amazing to see a site like that. Even though we were 50 miles or so away we could see it.

We headed back to the lodge in the late afternoon and sat down to yet another gourmet meal. I am a bit of a picky eater, and there was not one meal I did not like. We had Halibut, Salmon, Chicken, Rib eye steak, and Fillet Mignon. Plus hor devours and drinks before dinner. Another plus to this trip was all the soda and alcohol was included.

Most of the Halibut we caught was in the 30 to 50 lb range. The largest for the week was 106lbs. One morning we caught 34 Halibut. Actually we caught quite a bit more than that, but we are only allowed to keep 2 per day, per person. The Salmon were not running at the time we were there so only a few were caught. I also caught 4 Spiny Dog Fish, a Flounder and a strange looking fish called a Greenling. The Spiny Dog Fish is in the shark family. We even saw a few bears and moose while we were there.

By the end of our 5 day fishing trip, the 20 of us had 1400lbs of fish fillets to divide. We all got 70lbs of Halibut and Salmon, some of the Salmon was smoked for us too. I am looking forward to doing this trip again next year. I highly recommend this trip to anyone. The Trophy King Lodge has a web site if you want to check it out Google them.